On election morning I went to a local cafe for my morning fix - coffee and a peak at the early exit polls on the Drudge Report. At the front counter the cafe owner told me with concern that an Ohio friend of hers had called to say that the electronic machine she'd voted on had switched her vote from Kerry to Bush. Not this shit all over again, I thought to myself, until I logged on and saw Kerry's promising, if not commanding, numbers across the country.
Kerry's exit poll margins held until late on Election Day. Polls provided to the networks at 7:30 Eastern Time showed Kerry ahead 51 - 48 nationally. According to Thom Hartmann, a progressive radio host who was on his shift at the time, an AP feed came over the radio at 12:20 a.m. announcing that long-time Bush political consultant Karen Hughes had had a sit-down with her candidate to discuss his imminent loss.
As in 2000, Bush survived a near-death experience and made a seemingly miraculous comeback.
Those crazy exit polls
In the weeks after the 2004 election, reports of voter intimidation, outrageous lines, electronic votes switching from Kerry to Bush, machine malfunctions, and other problems in Ohio - all of which benefited Bush - flooded the Internet. In combination with the exit poll numbers, these incident reports led some of the bolder bloggers to suggest that Ohio '04 was a replay of Florida '00, in which Bush stepped into office on the backs of tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters.
Academic reports appeared that backed these theories: Steven Freeman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, weighed the election day exit polls in three swing states - Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania - and concluded that the chances of the exit polls swinging to the extent they did was 1 in 662,000. Ron Paul Baiman, an economist and statistician at the University of Illinois, put the chances of the exit poll swing at 1 to 255,000,000.
Republican pollster Dick Morris said: "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries" (Morris went on to blame the exit poll discrepancy on a corporate media conspiracy to suppress the Republican vote in the West.)
Republican pollster Dick Morris said: "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries" (Morris went on to blame the exit poll discrepancy on a corporate media conspiracy to suppress the Republican vote in the West.)
On the other side (Bush’s side) was the American media establishment. With few exceptions, the columnists that ventured opinions said that exit polls were simply unreliable in such a high turnout race, and/or that Kerry's exit poll lead up through 7:30 Eastern Time was within the margin of error. The possibility of mass irregularities was ignored or denounced as the overcrazed imaginations of conspiracy nuts, though the reversal of an exit poll lead only slightly larger than Kerry's in Ukraine sparked a frenzy of indignation among the major media and prominent Republicans.
The unwillingness of exit poll provider Warren Mitofsky to release his raw poll data, or to explain how his numbers had been so wrong, did nothing to fan the flames. Mitofsky, who was paid $10,000,000 for his exit polls, later blamed the discrepancies on poorly trained exit poll workers and the general unreliability of polls.
In the decisive state of Ohio, the evening turnaround for Bush seemed in line with what I'd heard about Ohio elections (that progressive candidates typically lose ground as election day wears on and votes come in from the sticks and the vanilla suburbs). The clever Rovian inclusion of the poisonously divisive Issue 1 (a constitutional amendment to force cities and universities to end domestic partner benefits) on the Ohio ballot was certain to have pried the scared white masses out of the woodwork in droves.
Yet ... at the same time, buried but breathing in the public domain were a growing number of articles on irregularities in Ohio, including a wealth of information at www.freepress.org(to whom I am indebted for a good portion of the numbers in this piece.)
At first most of the reports seemed purely anecdotal, a stone in the 140,000-vote margin ocean, but, particularly with the investigation and accompanying report done by John Conyers - the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the Congressional Black Caucus - larger patterns began to form, patterns that uniformly favored Bush.
The elephant in the room
Racial disenfranchisement is the dirtiest little "secret" about American elections (though electronic voting and opti-scan machines are gaining steam). Across the country, minorities tend to live in cities that use old-school punchcard balloting systems, in part due to the inability of poor precincts to afford newer voting technologies.
Punchcard machines are susceptible to getting clogged with chads (the paper holes that are dislodged when a ballot is punched), blocking the voter from punching all the way through their ballot, which results in ballots not registering a vote for the desired candidate (this is called an "undervote"). At other times punchcards are not properly slid and aligned into the voting machine, leading to votes for the wrong candidates. According to an ACLU study, punchcard machines reject votes at 2 & 1/2 to 3 times the rate of newer technologies, which is backed by the federal Civil Rights Commission's finding that 54% of the 179,000 uncounted votes in Florida 2000 were cast by blacks, over 90% of whom voted for Al Gore.
Compounding this structural disenfranchisement were the actions of Republican elections officials across the country. A Republican State Representative and Bush campaign official from Michigan summed up his party’s modus operandi when he told US News & World Report that Republicans would lose Michigan "if we do not suppress the Detroit vote." Detroit is over 80% black. In Florida, members of law enforcement intimidated black voting activists in Orlando by showing up at their homes unannounced for "questioning", just after which the BBC unearthed internal GOP documents showing lists of black precincts to suppress. Earlier, Republican Secretary of State Glenda Hood had tried to revive a felon purge list (a tactic that had wrongly disenfranchised tens of thousands of black voters in 2000) that included many non-felons who happened to be black. Hood dropped the purge only after a court ruled that the list had to be released to the media.
Unfortunately, these tactics are unknown to many white Americans. In a poll by Harvard professor Michael Dawson, 37% of whites thought the heavily-documented targeting of black voters in Florida in 2000 was a Democratic "fabrication". 9% of whites said that if such efforts had been made, they were "not a problem" (9%) or "not so big a problem" (13%).
The funky smell in Ohio tapers back to well before the election, to the doorstep of Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. As in the 2000 presidential race, the Secretary of State in the pivotal Electoral College battleground just happened to be co-chair of Bush’s statewide operation. Blackwell, the flip-flop sensei to Kerry's yellow belt, is a born-again African-American who has gone in just thirty years from a liberal Democrat to a moderate Democrat to an independent to a moderate Republican to his present station as a right-wing Republican. Blackwell's personal motto is "a passion for truth, a quest for excellence."
When not being censured for illegally using taxpayer funds to run a get-out-the vote effort from his office on behalf of Issue I, or being accused of running a campaign slush fund with money left over from the purchase of voting machines, Blackwell made rules that determined the fate of unknown thousands of votes in Ohio. Seeking all the help he could get from GOP friends in Ohio and DC for his upcoming 2006 campaign for the governor's office of Ohio, Blackwell's decisions uniformly benefited Bush, apart from his support for keeping Ralph Nader off the Ohio ballot.
Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell and other Ohio Republicans tried to mandate electronic voting machines with no paper trail statewide, to be purchased from Diebold, a machine manufacturer whose CEO Wally O'Dell had said in a 2003 Bush fundraiser invitation that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Democrats raised a stink, as they didn't like the idea of private, Republican-run companies with little or no transparency collecting and tabulating vote counts. Eventually Blackwell backed down, professing a sudden concern about the serious security problems posed by electronic voting machines. To maintain a paper trail, Democrats were left with the lesser evil of punchcard ballots in urban areas.
Though Blackwell had allowed provisional ballots (ballots cast by voters who claim to be registered but can't be found on polling station voter rolls) cast in the wrong precinct to be counted in the 2004 Ohio primary, in the months just prior to the 2004 presidential election he ruled that provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct would be invalidated. This move, replicated by Republican officials in three other swing states, guaranteed that Kerry votes (minorities and students in particular) would be disqualified at a high rate, as city precincts were much more likely to have changed in the 2000 Census redistricting, and low-income voters move with far greater frequency than those further up the economic ladder. In addition, many Ohio urban polling places house multiple precincts within the same building, so votes cast in the right building, but deposited into the wrong ballot box, would not be counted.
Blackwell exhumed an archaic Ohio law that disqualified registration forms not filled out on 80-pound weight bond paper (he later relented under pressure), ruled that voters who had been sent absentee ballots couldn't cast paper ballots at the polls, even if they had never received the absentee ballots (overturned in court), backed a GOP effort to challenge 35,000 new voter registrations, mostly students and other Kerry voters (also overturned in court), and gave a nod to the GOP move to post "election challengers" in precincts where Gore had tallied 60% or more of the vote in 2000.
Election challengers got a big boost from the Bush Administration, who broke decades of Justice Department legal precedent to file a brief on behalf of the organized, systematic suppression of the vote. Trained in secret (unlike progressive vote protection poll-watchers), 3,600 $100/day GOP rent-a-thugs were hired for Ohio, where they were to use identification challenges and other tactics to gum up the works at already chaotic and congested urban polling sites. The GOP move to post challengers was rejected by a circuit court, but accepted on appeal by a Republican-led appeals court.
The post-game wrap-up
"This has been a good day for Ohio."
-Kenneth Blackwell
Not long after the election, the Green and Libertarian Party presidential candidates filed for a recount in Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell issued two orders: 1) that ballots had to be locked up/could not be examined by public interest groups until the recount, which 2) would not begin until the electoral votes had been certified for Bush. A lawsuit to force an immediate recount, before the Electoral College certification, was rejected by a Republican judge.
Blackwell was not the only Republican official with a hand in the Ohio results. Matt Damshroder, the Republican head of the Franklin County Board of Elections, was responsible for the allocation of voting machines in Franklin County, including the treasure trove of votes for John Kerry in Columbus, the state capital and home of Ohio State University. Months before the 2004 election, William Anthony (the chair of the Franklin County Board of Elections) had publicly requested more voting machines - due to a study showing Franklin would need 5,000 voting machines (at the time, Franklin had only 2,832) to accommodate the county's 25% increase in voter registration - but was turned down. In response, the Democratic Party sued, claiming that the chronic shortage of voting machines in minority districts violated the Voting Rights Act. On election day, Damshroder testified in federal court that he had no remedy for the anemic supply of voting machines in inner-city precincts, as the county was simply all tapped out.
The predictable result was a severe shortage of voting machines (29% of Columbus precincts had fewer machines than in the lower-turnout 2000 election) and rain-drenched 4-5 hour lines in most precincts in heavily Democratic Columbus, despite much shorter lines in the Bush-leaning Franklin County suburbs, and the lowest increase in turnout from 2000 of any county (2%) in the state.
Hit particularly hard in Columbus were minority-majority districts, where voters were subjected to ballot shortages, precinct relocations, precincts opening late, broken machines, GOP challengers, and city employees threatening to ticket and/or tow their cars because they had had to park on a public lawn (due to a shortage of parking spaces).
It was later revealed that voters in six Franklin precincts were told to go home at 7:30 on election day, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, while across town The Texas Strike Force, a group hired by the GOP and feted with hotel fare, made payphone calls (from a hotel across the street from GOP headquarters) in which they are alleged to have erroneously informed overwhelmingly Democratic former inmates that they couldn't vote. Meanwhile, it turned out that alongside the 77 machines that malfunctioned on election day, Damshroder had held back 125 machines at the start of election day, and ended up leaving 68 machines on ice all day despite repeated calls from urban districts for back ups.
Damshroder's list of voting machines showed a high priority for Bush-friendly suburban districts, while 42 machines meant for minority precincts were blacked out, leaving those precincts with fewer machines than they had had in the 2004 primaries. Bush won 27 of Franklin County's 29 suburban wards, all 27 of which had a higher ratio of machines/voters than any single ward in the city of Columbus. A rare Washington Post article on Ohio '04 said that 5,000 - 15,000 voters in Columbus walked away without voting, according to bipartisan estimates. Kerry precincts with machine-to-voter ratios similar to Bush precincts had equivalent turnout, but countywide Kerry precincts had only a 50% turnout, compared to 60% for Bush.
Kerry's richest vein of votes was heavily black, punchcard-voting Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, where Kerry received 83% of the vote. Yet Cleveland was also where Kerry lost the most votes. In addition to rain and machine shortages and Republican challengers and long lines was a high degree of confusion among and shortage of election officials and a host of new voters uncertain of their exact precinct. Many polling places in Cleveland housed multiple precincts, sowing confusion as to where to deposit completed ballots, or voters waited in line for an hour or more, only to be told they were in the wrong line. Innumerable new voters were not on the voting rolls (the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections was sued for botching 11,000 new registrations), and had to fill out provisional ballots, which would be subject to strict Republican challenge, causing Cuyahoga - Kerry's strongest county - to contribute the most provisional ballots statewide (24,000) of any county.
Buried within the 24,000 provisional ballots are some curious details. Thousands of provisional voters were disqualified because they had voted in the wrong precinct, even if they had voted in the correct building, and other provisional votes were disqualified for not containing a date of birth, or because the signatures in the poll records were in cursive while the signatures on the registration forms were printed. Many Cleveland precincts posted provisional ballot disqualification rates of 50% or higher, including one precinct that went to Kerry 10 to 1 in which 74% of the provisional votes were disqualified.
As in the rest of Ohio's cities, long lines, voter intimidation, poll worker incompetence and general confusion had a devastating effect on turnout in Cleveland. 30 of Kerry's strongest precincts (where Kerry won 80% of the vote and up) had turnouts of under 40%, including eight which had turnout of 30% and under, down to 7%. Overall, turnout in the bluest region of Ohio was just under 50%, though it was over 60% statewide, and 6% of the vote in Cleveland was never even counted, though the disqualification rate in the Cleveland suburbs was just .7%.
In addition, 10 inner-city Cleveland precincts had inexplicably high third party candidate totals: for example, in Cleveland's precinct 4F Kerry had 290 votes, while Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka had 215; the precinct had had a total of 8 third party votes in 2000, when Ralph Nader was on the ballot.
Cities in the rest of Ohio followed the same patterns, to one degree or another - shortages of machines and/or ballots, machine malfunctions, white poll challengers in black districts, and provisional ballot confusion - with some variations. In Cincinnati, which went to Kerry with 65% of the vote, the Republican-dominated Hamilton County Board of Elections had done a nifty voter purge prior to November 2nd, in which they removed the names of 105,000 people who had not voted in the past two elections, which forced many of the 105,000 voters who did show up at the polls to use high-risk provisional ballots. Cincinnati followed the urban trend of huge numbers of votes with no tabulated vote for president ("undervotes"). Two Kerry-dominated Cincinnati inner-city precincts posted 25% undervote totals (though the undervote rate was only 2% statewide). To take the 25% figure at face value one must believe that 6,000 voters braved cold and rain and long lines, but didn’t bother to cast a vote in the most important presidential race in memory. The 47 Montgomery County precincts with undervote rates of over 4% went to Kerry 7 to 1, while the 22 precincts with undervotes of over 8% went to Kerry 10 to 1.
Lucas County was a case study in how not to run an election. Voting machines failed in tests in the week prior to election day, and many of the same machines failed on election day, increasing the already lengthy lines, which were exacerbated in some precincts by late poll openings and ballot shortages. Numerous voters were directed to the wrong precincts in the Democratic bastion of Toledo, and 28,000 voters had been purged from the rolls because they hadn't voted in the previous two elections, leading to a huge number of provisional ballots, 41% of which were disallowed (the highest rejection rate state-wide). In Kerry-heavy areas, 917 voters were disqualified for being in the wrong precinct (though 345 were in the right building). The poll inequities helped Bush win 7 of the 9 wards with the largest turnout, while the 63 precincts in Toledo with less than 60% turnout all went to Kerry. The screwups in Lucas were so pronounced that the Board elections director resigned and four other officials were suspended after the election.
Following the trend of targeting new, progressive student voters, Republicans posted vote challengers at Central State University (95% Kerry) and Athens University, where more than 8% of the voters had to fill out provisional ballots. At the same time Republican county elections officials shorted universities of voting machines in Oberlin (whose voter registration had increased from 500 - 2100 since 2000) and Kenyon University, where there were two machines for 1,100 voters (1/11th of the legal standard), leaving voters standing in line until 4 a.m. Meanwhile, close by in conservative Christian Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, ample machines had been moved in by Kenneth Blackwell a month in advance of the election.
Overall, Ohio turnout was 10% higher in Bush-friendly rural and suburban districts than in the Kerry-strong urban areas, which had had the biggest surge in registered voters and the most to lose from a Bush victory.
Away from the huge population centers the irregularities got even stranger. In Coshocton County, write-in votes for Kerry defaulted to Bush when run through voting machines. In Trumbull County, voters testified that they had received punchcard ballots with Bush's name already punched in. In Mahoning County, 25 - 30 electronic voting machines had to be recalibrated following numerous reports of votes hopping from Kerry to Bush; the precincts in Mahoning County with the largest undervote counts went 10-1 for Kerry.
Miami County used opti-scan technology, in which ballots are fed into central tabulators that count the votes. Opti-scan machines are known for being easily hackable; voting rights activist Bev Harris hacked into one in less than two minutes live on CNBC. Miami County's results did nothing to dampen security concerns: some Bush precincts tabulated Frankenstein-like turnouts upwards of 90% and increased voter registrations of up to 190%, while Kerry - who had campaigned relentlessly in Ohio, with the organizing and full financial muscle of both independent groups and the Democratic party - received fewer votes than Gore in many precincts, though Gore had faced a third party challenge from Ralph Nader and had pulled all of his money out of Ohio a month before the election to vie for Florida. Turnout was up 21% (though the population had only increased 1.4%), and one Bush precinct had a turnout of 98.5% - leaving only 10 registered voters who had not voted - though a post-election canvass of the voter rolls had turned up 25 voters who claimed to have not voted. Strangest of all were the two different sets of vote counts submitted by Miami County to state officials. After 19,000 votes were added to the first set of vote returns, Bush and Kerry's percentages of the vote remained virtually identical - 66% and 34% - leaving Bush with a Miami County margin of exactly 16,000 votes.
Lifting a page from Katherine Harris's wildly successful stamp-out-the-vote operation in Florida 2000, 20 Republican-dominated Ohio counties sent legally groundless letters to former prisoners telling them they couldn't vote, while in three southern counties - Warren, Butler, and Perry - Bush more than covered his eventual statewide margin with a 132,700-vote victory over Kerry, a margin 40,000 votes larger than Bush had posted over the underfunded and absent Al Gore in 2000. Slicing and dicing the numbers in these three counties would demand weeks with a magnifying glass. Highlights include: an underfunded liberal female African-American judicial candidate who received several thousand more votes than the money-soaked Kerry-Edwards ticket in numerous precincts; 3,100 voters in Perry County who had registered on 11/8/77 (a year in which no federal elections took place), where two Bush-dominated precincts posted a certified turnout of 124%; and Warren County, where Republican county officials shut down the Board of Elections for two hours due to a homeland security alert from the FBI. During the alert, journalists and party officials weren't allowed to watch the vote count. In time it was revealed that the FBI had never issued an alert, and Warren election officials had been notified of the lockdown a week in advance.
The recount
In the midst of dramatic public hearings in which first-hand accounts of mass disenfranchisement (in Columbus and Cleveland) were publicly aired, the recount took place as scheduled by Kenneth Blackwell, after the electors had cast their votes for Bush. Under state law, county elections officials - appointed by Blackwell - picked precincts from each county, often steering clear of precincts with anomalous numbers. County officials were allowed to decide what differential from the original machine count would trigger a full hand recount. Only one of Ohio's 88 counties was completely recounted by hand.
Immediately after the election, Bush lost 3,893 votes when it came out that an electronic voting machine in Gahanna (Franklin County) had given Bush 4,258 votes in a district that had only 680 registered voters. Bush's statewide lead was adjusted to 136,000 votes. Kerry picked up 18,000 votes in the recount of 77% of the provisional ballots, leaving behind 35,000 provisional ballots and 93,000 undervotes, or 128,000 uncounted ballots, most of which we can safely say were intended for Kerry.
Which leaves us at an official Bush margin of 118,000 votes.
On the same day that electors cast their votes for Bush, a lawsuit was filed in federal court alleging that Kerry would have won in a fairly administered, fully-funded election. Richard Hayes Phillips, a PHD in Geomorphology, filed a suit in which (based largely on the incidents listed above) he tabulated projected vote losses for Kerry in uncounted ballots (16,650), provisional ballots (5,370), Cleveland (17,500), Columbus (17,000), Toledo (7,000), Butler/Clermont/Warren counties (27,154), Miami County (6,000), and Mahoning (2,200), among other counties, totaling 101, 020 votes. An addendum at the bottom of the filing added possibilities of extra Bush votes in Butler, to the tune of over 20,000 votes, enough in combination with the other projections to have handed the presidency to Kerry. Due to the time-sensitive nature of the lawsuit, Phillips was only able to do a precinct-by-precinct analysis in 15 of Ohio's 88 counties.
Back at the ranch
Fresh from doing everything in his power to elect the GOP standard-bearer and help end the scourge of domestic partner benefits, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell sent out a fundraising request with the sincere plug that he had helped "deliver the great Buckeye state for George W. Bush" and announced a statewide mandate requiring eminently hackable opti-scan machines (from Republican vendors Diebold and ES & S) by 2006, when he will be running for governor. The letter found its way to the media, which forced Blackwell to admit that the inclusion in his fundraising solicitation of a pitch for "corporate checks" was illegal under Ohio campaign law. Blackwell's spokesman blamed the printer for the error.
Meanwhile, the lawsuits filed - Moss v. Bush and Moss v. Moyer - were thrown out of the State Supreme Court by the 5 - 2 Republican majority, including newly re-elected Republican Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, who refused to recuse himself. When the lawsuits were re-filed, Ohio's Republican Attorney slapped a sanction on the four lawyers who filed suit, claiming their suits were "frivolous", allowing Blackwell to continue to avoid public testimony. Blackwell shrugged his shoulders over much ado about nothing and hit the fundraising circuit. One of the opening stops on Blackwell's gubernatorial fundraising tour was an event at the elite Scioto Country Club in Columbus. The theme of the speech was "Ethics in Leadership."
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